The global financial crisis of 2008 ushered in a system of informal decision-making in the grey zone between economics and politics. Legitimized by a rhetoric of emergency, ad hoc bodies have usurped democratically elected governments. In line with the neoliberal credo, the recent crisis has been used to realize the politically impossible and to re-align executive power with the interests of the finance industry.In this important book, Joseph Vogl offers a much longer perspective o...

In many western societies today the optimism of the 1990s and early 2000s has given way to a deep unease and sense of foreboding. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, many people feel worse off and the future seems bleak. The mood has changed – that’s clear. But what is ‘the mood’? How can feelings be shared by many people, and how do these shared feelings shape the course of events?In this book, the sociologist Heinz Bude offers a highly original analysis of this vital but ne...

Reiki Healing Mastery Bundle, 2 in 1 Bundle: Reiki Essential Guide and Spiritual ReikiIntroducing the Reiki Healing Mastery Bundle: 2 in 1 Bundle—your comprehensive guide to mastering the art of energy healing and harnessing the spiritual power of Reiki. This audiobook collection includes:Reiki Essential Guide: Techniques and Insights to Master the Art of Energy Healing – Dive into the fundamentals of Reiki and learn essential techniques to tap into the healing power of energ...

Hailed as one of the world’s masterpieces of psychological realism, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high-court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?The first part of the story portrays Iv...

NOT THE END OF THE STORYThe lore of Averoigne didn’t end with Clark Ashton Smith. Over the decades other writers, fascinated by this “Lovecraft country” of medieval France, added their own contributions. For the first time collected together into one volume, you can read over two dozen poems and stories of Averoigne (including some never before published) by Mythos authors like DJ Tyrer, Richard Tierney, Brian McNaughton, Michael Minnis, and James Chambers. Revisit...

In The Idiot, a saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power, and sexual conquest than the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections. Extortion, scandal, and murder follow, testing the wreckage left by human misery to find “man in man.”The Idiot is a quintessentially Russian...

Exiled to four years in Siberia, but hailed by the end of his life as a saint, prophet, and genius, Fyodor Dostoevsky holds an exalted place among the best of the great Russian authors. One of Dostoevsky's five major novels, Devils follows the travails of a small provincial town beset by a band of modish radicals - and in so doing presents a devastating depiction of life and politics in late 19th-century Imperial Russia. Both a grotesque comedy and a shocking illustration of clashing ideol...

Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch Myshkin is one of the great characters in Russian literature. Is he a saint or just naïve? Is he an idealist or, as many in General Epanchin’s society feel, an ‘idiot’? Certainly his return to St Petersburg after years in a Swiss clinic has a dramatic effect on the beautiful Aglaia, youngest of the Epanchin daughters, and on the charismatic but wilful Nastasya Filippovna. As he paints a vivid picture of Russian society, Dostoyevsky shows how principles conflict wi...

No discussion of great modern authors is complete without mention of Cormac McCarthy, whose rare and blazing talent makes his every work a true literary event. A grand addition to the American literary canon, Suttree introduces readers to Cornelius Suttree, a man who abandons his affluent family to live among a dissolute array of vagabonds along the Tennessee river. "Suttree contains a humor that is Faulknerian . and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor."-Times Lit...

The Nantucket whaling ship, the Pequod, spirals the globe in search of Moby Dick, the mythical white whale of the Southern Oceans. Driven on by the obsessive revenge of Captain Ahab, the crew and the outcast Ishmael find themselves caught up in a demonic pursuit which leads inexorably to an apocalyptic climax.

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of the evergreen classic novel by Louisa May Alcott.With their father away fighting in the American Civil War, the four March girls are facing a lean Christmas with their mother. But the sisters’ close bond and determination to make the best of things enables them to find happiness despite their poverty.As the years go by we follow their fortunes as they journey into womanhood. Meg the beauty, Jo the tomboy, shy Beth and precocious Amy ...

"[Book 2] sears the reader because Knausgaard is a passionate idealist [who] wants to fight the conformity and homogeneity of modern bourgeois existence." -James Wood, The New Yorker In the second installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental six-volume masterpiece, the character Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to Stockholm, where, having left his wife, he leads a solitary existence. He strikes up a deep friendship with another exiled Norwegian, a Nietzschean intellectual and boxing fanatic na...